In a Hacker News post, the cloud.gov team shares that the platform has attained FedRAMP Ready status, moving it closer to operating as a full-service cloud provider for federal technology projects.

The team responsible for the project is hosting an open “Ask Me Anything” style question and answer session, and the post has already unearthed a number of conversations around hiring and the nuances of federal government operations related to cloud deployment.

From cloud.gov product lead Bret Mogilefsky:

I’m the product lead on cloud.gov… Thanks for noticing us! There are other Cloud Foundry deployments, but what makes cloud.gov special is the focus on ensuring federal agencies are actually able to use it. Federal compliance for a cloud service provider is a tough bar to clear, and without it most agencies are simply unable to take advantage of capabilities the rest of the world now takes for granted. That in turn impedes improvements in the many services the government has to offer. We’ve just reached the “FedRAMP Ready” status, which is a signifier of confidence that cloud.gov will make it through the exhaustive auditing process to come. Best of all, everything were doing is open source, including all the compliance work, so others will be able to follow in our footsteps. AMA!

Once cloud.gov achieves full FedRAMP status, coupled with the internal open source and agile/DevOps development environment they’ve created, the opportunities for 18F to help agencies quickly and fully deploy projects are endless.

“18F is going to be a model Cloud Service Provider (CSP) in the federal space,” Mogilefsky said in a May interview with Cloud Foundry. “Cloud.gov is only part of the equation.”